Linguist Katharina Schuhmann appointed

Dr Katharina Schuhmann has been appointed Junior Professor of German as a Foreign Language at the Institute of German Studies, funded by the Federal Government-Länder Programme.

She was previously Assistant Professor of German and Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University (USA). Schuhmann studied English and Religious Education at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg before obtaining two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Stony Brook University (NY, USA). Towards the end of her doctoral work, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University (PA, USA). Schuhmann subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy) and taught at the University of Bonn.

Schuhmann's research includes foreign and second language acquisition, theoretical linguistics, and psycholinguistics, with a focus on phonetic, phonological, and morphological aspects. She investigates across disciplines, including perceptual and lexical adaptation phenomena, processing of grammatical properties, as well as cross-linguistic and language contact effects. In the field of applied linguistics, she researches how innovative methods can be used to teach foreign language pronunciation and grammar.